Designer of the world's first word processor
Born: April 12, 1925;
Died: December 8, 2018
EVELYN Berezin, who has died aged 93, was a computer scientist who designed the world's first world processor, which went on sale in the early 1970s.
She also had some other remarkable achievements in her career: she developed the first computer system for making airline reservations (one that worked across the United States without a breakdown for more than 10 years); she created a weapons-targeting calculator and she developed gambling terminals for horse racing tracks.
Berezin's word processor was called the Data Secretary and was over 3ft tall. It featured a keyboard, cassette drives, control electronics and a printer and allowed the user to record and play back and edit what they had typed.
Berezin had spotted that some six per cent of all the people in the United States worked as secretaries and believed their job could be made more efficient.
"At the time we started, which was in 1968 to 1969, nobody really had any desk-type computers on which you could write a word-processing program that a secretary would use," she said. "I know that desktop computers seem obvious now but it wasn't so then."
Born in New York, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Berezin studied physics at New York University before joining the Electronic Computer Corporation in 1951. It was here that she designed her artillery-aiming machine for the US Defence Department.
In the late 1950s she joined Teleregister where she continued to design computers, including computerised banking systems. She also developed her online reservations system for United Airlines. First tested in 1962, it matched customers to available seats and was reported to have a one-second response time and to have worked for 11 years without any central system failures.
Berezin began working on her word processor in 1968 and with two male colleagues founded a new company Redactron to develop it.
She remembered that the launch of the prototype did not go according to plan. It was a dry day and the build-up of static electricity meant the machine could not be started.
“To our horror it was a dry day and the engineers were setting this non-working machine up for our big story,” Berezin said. “Ed Wolf, our head of engineering, brought a full pail of water and without a word to anyone throws the pail of water over the whole thick carpet in the room. The water sank into the carpet, which stayed damp for three or four hours, and the machine worked perfectly.”
Once launched, the machine was a success, with 10,000 of them being sold. Berezin sold the company in 1976, having built it up from nine employees to 500.
In later years, she had various business interests, including the venture capital company Greenhouse Management. She was pre-deceased by her husband, the chemical engineer Israel Wilenitz.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here